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Overconstrained: the Secret Lives of Rectangles

About the Talk

Ever wonder how CSS engines decide what to do when something has both a width and a min-width? Or how table layout really works? And what is the formalism that underpins CSS, anyway?

This talk walks through more than a decade of work in both industry and academia to try to get a handle on how to drag CSS out of the ad-hoc cesspool and into the can-be-reasoned-about light. Some updated work into describing important aspects of CSS formally will be presented; but don't worry, they're in JS and they're anything but pointless. They're so awesome you might just want to use them on your very next project.